Empowerment of Urban Women Through Local Food Processing Cooperatives in Alamata Town, Tigray, Ethiopia

Abstract

Cooperative is one of the strategies to achieve development and reduce poverty. Empirical studies on urban women empowerment via small scale local food processing cooperatives have little attention in business researches of developing countries. This study focuses on empowerment of urban women through local food processing cooperatives in Alamata town, Tigray, Ethiopia. Based on data collected from a sample of 150 members and customers of local food processing cooperatives, the researcher used descriptive statistics for analyzing attitude and competency of women in local food processing cooperatives, factor analysis for analyzing and identifying factors affecting local food processing cooperatives, and logistic regression for analyzing empowerment indicators of urban women in local food processing cooperatives. In addition, logistic regression model was also used to analyze empowerment indicators in the cooperatives. The majority of cooperative members have good attitude and competency towards small scale local food processing cooperatives that may have a positive impact on empowerment of urban women. Some variables such as family size and education, age and livestock ownership were negatively correlated. Factor analysis identified that economic dependency, lack of access to center of production, access to market, competency gap, access to credit, and health care difficulties were the challenges that participants faced. Therefore, formation of market network, evenly distributed nutritional trainings, special attention to women at older ages, opportunities for center of production, revision of banks and microfinance institutions’ prerequisites on provision of loan, were the recommendations of this study. Results of this study indicated over all progresses with limitations expressed above. Local food processing cooperatives were safeguard for empowerment of urban women at the grass root level. This was because they were not much capital intensive, rather profitable in limited capital in urban areas. 

Keywords: - Empowerment, women, food, cooperative, Alamata, Tigray, Ethiopia

DOI: 10.7176/JCSD/53-03

Publication date: November 30^th 2019